Haiti Has One of the Lowest Covid-19 Death Rates and Low Vaccination (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Haiti Has One of the Lowest Covid-19 Death Rates and Low Vaccination (2021)

atlantablackstar.com

36 pointswalterbell37 comments

> In Haiti, a country with a population of more than 11 million, there have been 13,164 cases throughout the entire pandemic

I think there are a few things at okay here. First, probably not super accurate reporting on all levels; infections, deaths, etc. Second, there may be something where impoverished nations suffer less because their immunity maybe is stronger. I need to do some digging to see if there's some correlation at the very least.

From a link in the article, their impoverished neighbor has much higher numbers. A sizable discrepancy has existed throughout 2020, 2021 and 2022, i.e. before and after vaccines became available, so that doesn't seem to be a factor.

> Across the border in the neighboring Dominican Republic, with roughly the same population, the pandemic has killed almost ten times the number, 2,364.

Good find. Thanks! A lot of the other points made here also make much more sense. I stand corrected.

The Dominican Republic may not be very wealthy, but they're not exactly impoverished either, especially not by Haitian standards. Their GDP per capita PPP was more than six times as high in 2021. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat... The 2,364 deaths are probably still an undercount, but less so than in Haiti.

Yes, the Dominican Republic has much better medical infrastructure. As of 2021-06-24 (translated from Spanish):

> According to official data, the country has applied 7.402.235 doses and already 2.655.737 people are fully vaccinated

https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2021/06/24/republica-dominicana-o...

The first rounds of vaccination were AstraZeneca, and as noted in that link at that point in time:

> In total, the caribbean country has bought around 31 million dosis of covid-19 vaccine. Of those, 10,768,000 are Sinovac, 9,999,990 Pfizer, and another 10 million are AstraZeneca.

Meanwhile, as per the article which is dated 2021-05-14:

> When COVAX, a program run by the World Health Organization, offered Haiti AstraZeneca vaccines, the government declined the offer.

My first thought as well. It most likely a issue of the data not being collected and reported. This is hard to get done correctly even in wealthy countries with well resourced institutions and infrastructure.

> Second, there may be something where impoverished nations suffer less because their immunity maybe is stronger. I need to do some digging to see if there's some correlation at the very least.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-confirmed-deaths-of...

This comment section offers a great insight how human brain tends to wrap facts in its prior accepted mythology before processing it. Hence, the brain does not really ingest the facts and adjust its reasoning - it rather adjusts the facts to fit the prior reasoning.

This of course makes mythology and organizations behind it (loke the good old, 2000 years, kids loving one) super sticky across generations. In essence, these organizations are the consequence of this feature (or is it a bug) of the human brain.

I believe the society of beings with brains capable of processing and adjusting to raw facts would be entirely different, probably alien to humans.

Or perhaps society would not be able to form? Imagine a baby figures out that the parents don’t love it, rather than create some myth justifying their behavior… it would tend to exit the family rather than be a part of it, forming a society….

Sadly, it’s exactly the people who create the most poor life experiences who benefit by this feature the most.

Control for risk factor such as age, and confounding factors such as having little organized medical infrastructure.

If all of your vulnerable population has already died...

Even when the US comparison is limited to young people, there is still a huge delta.

Can you elaborate on this claim? The article does not make it and I have not seen it made in comments here.

78 Haitian vs 136 US deaths per million, below 50 years old, as of 2022, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181711

Age isn’t the only factor how many Americans under the age of 50 are living with a compromised immune system and other factors vs Hatians?

Overall immunocompromised in the US is 3%, so that number will be smaller after the elderly are excluded. If we discount 136 per million by 3% (max), that leaves about 132 US deaths per million for non-immunocompromised people below 50 years.

Per other comments and a linked article, poor Haitian healthcare infrastructure means that people with chronic conditions often die from those conditions, so the number of 78 Haitian deaths per million is unlikely to change due to immunocompromised people, https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/12/16/haiti-has-lo...

> in (the U.S.) people who have those diseases, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, we extend their life by giving them good health treatment. Well in Haiti, people don’t have access to that treatment. ... If you’re elderly and you have a disease, you die if you live in the provinces.

While the brainstorming and proposed theories are interesting, there are three years of articles linked above, which all conclude that the reasons remain unknown. Obvious factors like age, location, vaccines, masks and lockdowns have already been ruled out as a singular explanation. Genetics might be a possibility. This seems like a topic worthy of scientific study, not just for Haiti, with potential lessons for billions of people around the world.

Do you think the distribution of ages between Haiti and US under 50 is the same? And that the methodology and reporting are similar? Those numbers seem to be in a similar ballpark without accounting for obvious possible differences.

As ChatGPT(s) might say, one could imagine multiple options, including "nothing to see here", yet "worthy of rebuttal".

Ok. Given the context, lack of plausible mechanism for explaining the observed difference, and lots of obvious possible confounding variables that have not been controlled, I would lean towards "nothing to see."

There aren't many sedentary, obese type-2 diabetics in Haiti. That probably makes a huge difference in death rates.

Some key demographics [1]:

                             Haiti     USA
    Life expectancy (M)        62       75
    Life Expectancy (F)        67       80

Obesity rate [2] is 36.7% (USA) vs 22.7% (Haiti).

So the most vulnerable population (ie older people) are way less prevalent and obesity is significantly lower. I don't know if that fully explains things or not.

I really hate these stories though because they always bring out confirmation biased Antivax Andys.

[1]: https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=H...

[2]: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/compare/united-states/haiti

don't understand the downvotes. Agree with you.

Sweden life expectancy is 83.18 [1] and Sweden had only small bump in deaths [2]. It looks like people died from obesity or lockdown effects like closing hospitals for non covid health problems.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/life-expect...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

we are talking about Haiti ... thanks for the Sweden statistic. I find both interesting, yet not consider them as downvotable.

there are too many people on hackernews recently who just downvote based on their gut.

Looks like destitute countries don't have enough people who make it to the risk factors of old age + overweight.

Not Haiti but a similar lack of vaccination and modern medical infrastructure in Uganda, first hand report from Dr. John Campbell and Andrew Wefwafwa:

- 2022-09-14 “Africa, low vaccination, covid over.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyoiFEUq-Y

- 2022-12-28 “No apparent covid in Africa” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=222G8VV6hx4

> The Caribbean nation has one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world, at just 22 per million. In Delhi, that number reached 892 in April before the outbreak continued to accelerate. In the United States, that figure stands at 1,800 per million, and at nearly 3,000 per million in some places in Europe.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/haiti/ & https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

2022 numbers for Haiti are 78 per million, while US is around 3000 per million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Haiti

> Haiti has vaccinated around 123k people as of May 2022, having a 1.1% vaccination rate.

Controlling for age, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

US non-elderly deaths (< 50 years) are 136 per million.

Not vaccinating people and destroying the healthcare system is certainly one way to get a population pyramid that looks like Haiti's. Those who remain alive will have lower probability of dying due to diseases like COVID 19 that hit the elderly the hardest and lower probability of having their deaths accurately recorded. Yes, we too can be Haiti if only we listen to Robert Kennedy Jr. and friends!

Has Haiti's population pyramid changed in recent years?

I believe same is the case for Nigeria. They're approx. 64% the size of USA in terms of population. 28% vaccinated, overall deaths: 3,155

The median Haitian is 24 years old. The median US person is 38. Covid death rates are highest in the elderly, of which there are not a ton in Haiti (~4% of the population is over 65).

HN ranking for this story, https://hnrankings.info/34181586/

Africa as well.

No apparent covid in Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=222G8VV6hx4

Sweden too had only small bump in deaths.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

>more than 11 million, there have been 13,164 cases throughout the entire pandemic, and 264 deaths

Given covid has proved really infectious but often mild, those numbers just say they have terrible testing. Probably more like 50%+ of the population have had it but not been diagnosed. In the UK they figure 70%+ and we have imperfect testing too.

Deaths are typically calculated as dying within 30 days of a positive test so no testing => no official covid deaths.

Lowest [reported] Covid-19 death sates

The cause of the purportedly lower African death rates? Insufficient reporting.

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